Citizenship in the Global South: Policing Irregular Migrants and Eroding Citizenship Rights in Mexico

• Author: Heidy Sarabia
• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Date: 01 November 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X18792007
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 229, Vol. 46 No. 6, November 2019, 42–55

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18792007

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

42

Citizenship in the Global South

Policing Irregular Migrants and Eroding Citizenship Rights in

Mexico

by

Heidy Sarabia

Research on the consequences of being an undocumented migrant has focused mostly

on the experiences of migrants in the Global North. Examination of experiences in Mexico

reveals the export by the United States of a transnational regime of illegality that has

transformed the citizenship rights of Mexican migrants in their own territory.

La investigación sobre las consecuencias de ser un migrante indocumentado se ha

centrado principalmente en las experiencias de los migrantes en el Norte Global. El exa-

men de las experiencias en México revela la exportación por los Estados Unidos de un

régimen transnacional de ilegalidad que ha transformado los derechos de ciudadanía de los

migrantes mexicanos en su propio territorio.

Keywords: Illegality, Citizenship, Migration, Transnationalization, Mexico

Historically, the Mexican government has advocated for the rights of

Mexican migrants in the United States. In a meeting with U.S. President Barack

Obama, President Enrique Peña Nieto applauded an executive order intended

to shield millions of migrants from deportation, calling it “an act of justice”

(Shear and Archibold, 2015).1 This interest in the fate of migrants is shaped in

part by the fact that approximately 10 percent of Mexico’s population lives in

the United States and 39 percent of Mexicans have friends or relatives there

(Pew Research Center, 2009). Moreover, in 2012 Mexico received US$23 billion

in remittances from Mexican residents of the United States (Cohn, Gonzalez-

Barrera, and Cuddington, 2013), making it the fourth-largest recipient of remit-

tances in the world (Ratha et al., 2013).

While Mexico values this migration and the sending of remittances, it has

developed draconian ways of preventing Central and South American migrants,

in particular, from traversing the nation to get to the United States. Today it

detains more Central Americans than the United States (Stevenson and Arce,

2015). This trend is the result of the active collaboration of the Mexican and U.S.

governments to “thicken” the U.S. border, with Mexico becoming the buffer

zone (Andreas, 2003: 10). This process has been referred to as the “externaliza-

tion of borders”—“extraterritorial activities in sending and in transit countries

at the request of the (more powerful) receiving states (e.g., the United States or

792007LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18792007Latin American PerspectivesSarabia / MIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS IN MEXICO

research-article2018

Heidy Sarabia is an assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Sacramento.

Her research focuses on globalization processes such as stratification, borders and borderlands,

border violence, transnational social change, and immigrant adaptation and incorporation.